of its literary page. We became strategists. We knew exactly
what Buller was to do on landing, and, still better, what the other
Generals should have done. Our map was the best that could be
bought, with flags that deserved a better fate than standing still.
Raffles woke me to hear "The Absent-Minded Beggar" on the morning it
appeared; he was one of the first substantial subscribers to the fund.
By this time our dear landlady was more excited than we. To our
enthusiasm for Thomas she added a personal bitterness against the Wild
Boars, as she persisted in calling them, each time as though it were
the first. I could linger over our landlady's attitude in the whole
matter. That was her only joke about it, and the true humorist never
smiled at it herself. But you had only to say a syllable for a
venerable gentleman, declared by her to be at the bottom of it all, to
hear what she could do to him if she caught him. She could put him in
a cage and go on tour with him, and make him howl and dance for his
food like a debased bear before a fresh audience every day. Yet a more
kind-hearted woman I have never known. The war did not uplift our
landlady as it did her lodgers.

But presently it ceased to have that precise effect upon us. Bad was
being made worse and worse; and then came more than Englishmen could
endure in that black week across which the names of three African
villages are written forever in letters of blood. "All three pegs,"
groaned Raffles on the last morning of the week; "neck-and-crop,
neck-and-crop!" It was his first word of cricket since the beginning
of the war.

We were both depressed. Old school-fellows had fallen, and I know
Raffles envied them; he spoke so wistfully of such an end. To cheer him
up I proposed to break into one of the many more or less royal
residences in our neighborhood; a tough crib was what he needed; but I
will not trouble you with what he said to me. There was less crime in
England that winter than for years past; there was none at all in
Raffles. And yet there were those who could denounce the war!

So we went on for a few of those dark days, Raffles very glum and
grim, till one fine morning the Yeomanry idea put new heart into us
all. It struck me at once as the glorious scheme it was to prove,
but it did not hit me where it hit others. I was not a fox-hunter, and
the gentlemen of England would scarcely have owned me as one of them.
The case of Raffles